Copy Tip 7: Your Offer II
When I re-read yesterday’s Copy Tip on the offer — and my fishing comparison, I noticed something quite important.
I mixed together the offer (the fish bait) and the vehicle (or media) used to deliver the message — the fishing rod, line, type of hook, boat/pier/sand etc.
I can’t help it sometimes, I just love this stuff and I forgot for a moment we are doing just one tip a day!
And we’re going to talk a lot more about the vehicle in later posts.
But for now I want to let you know how your offer and your vehicle do go together.
The important message in yesterday’s post is this: your offer and your vehicle (the second “O” and the “V” in my MOOVE marketing formula) are TIED TOGETHER somewhat — if you want to use them effectively!
For instance, if you want deep sea fishing for Marlin on a flathead hand-held rig, you’d probably struggle to hold the fish-bait on the hook, let alone attract, catch and haul in a big fish (to release again no doubt!).
Or if you didn’t understand your market, you could have the best Marlin fishing gear in the world and fail to get a bit if you were fishing for Marlin in a mountain lake! No bites there!
Have you heard this saying (I heard it from Tony Robbins):
Doesn’t matter how enthusiastically you walk, run and head east, you won’t see a sunset.
Okay, it’s not the exact words, but you get what I mean, yes?
You’ve got to look west for your sunset — and it’s the same with your offer and your vehicle.
They need to be the right combination to work effectively and get the result (objective) you’re after.
Here’s a business example.
You have a $25,000 per year coaching program.
Even when you put together a great offer (ah yes, one more day and we’ll cover the elements) — you still need to deliver your message in a way that’ll work and get your propsects to respond.
You’re probably going to get a lot less response if you print your message on 20 postcards and leave them in the local cafe versus having a live event where and other marketing strategies to really build up your levels of credibility , believability, trust and value.
Even a fantastic offer would be harder to sell on a single postcard versus the multi-step marketing sequence.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, let’s say you’re a young guy (or gal) selling pencils to racegoers for a few cents at the entrance to a local racecourse.
You still need to know your market (otherwise you might turn up on the wrong day) … but your offer might only be scribbled on a small sign — and you can still sell out of your product and be successful.
You don’t need multi-step copy, sales letters, video testimonials or newsletters.
(In fact, you have a powerful tool of influence working for you: social proof. We’ll cover Cialdini’s influence principles later on).
So as you can see, your offer and your vehicle are linked together (with your market and your objective).
This is the stuff that gives you awareness about what’s essential before you even write your copy!
Tomorrow, more on the offer and its essential elements (like urgency).
Copy Tip 6: Your Offer I
We’re back into the preparation today — the things you really must do to ensure your copy is effective and responsive as possible!
Stuff that’s essential for success.
So you’ve found a viable market.
You know more about them now.
And you know your goal / objective.
For me, it’s time to work out an OFFER.
Create your offer to meet your objective.
Again, it’s part of the sequence of your preparation that you must do to get the copy working hard!
If you were out fishing, it’d go like this …
You find a viable market — let’s say you live (like we do) near a bay — your market is the bay and you know it contains flathead (my dad catches these fish and they’re delicious!).
Your objective is to catch the flathead.
So your “offer” is the tempting morsel on your fish hook … it’s also the type of fishing rod you use, the type of line and even when you go out fishing on the bay (off the beach, on the pier, in a boat).
Just like with fishing, your offer contains some essential elements that need to be included.
Before I reveal these essential elements, there’s a few things to consider.
You’ve first got to make sure what you offer meets your objective.
Back to fishing for flathead. It’s no good putting fish-bait on your hook that is designed to catch marlin or trout. For starters, you won’t find either of these in the market (the bay).
And it’s no good using a float to keep the hook and bait up near the surface if the flathead swim along near the bottom.
It’s also no good sitting on the back of a speedboat with your line trailing behind you at 35 knots.
You’ve got to not only understand you want to catch flathead, but then “know your market” to make sure you do it effectively!
That’s why the initial steps are essential — otherwise you’ll go home hungry with an empty bucket — no fresh flathead for your dinner!
You’ve also got to know what competing offers are out there in the market.
If there are schools of the flathead’s favourite morsel in the bay, then your offer must be really tempting to get their interest. You’ve got attract attention!
And — an inside tip — you’ve got to know the maturity of your market (this is from Eugene Schwartz’s excellent book Breakthrough Advertising).
If the flathead are “wise” to your method of fishing — if they’ve seen your type of offer previously — they might not be so tempted. Or they may be a bit wary and elusive because they offer really isn’t that compelling to them.
The more offers your market has already seen, the more challenging it can be to reach them with an effective message. Not to say it’s impossible … but your market is intelligent and that cannot be ignored.
It’d be like Chicken Little yelling “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” … after you’ve heard that claim once — and believe it not to be true — you’re not likely to believe it the next time you hear it.
Now your offer I’m sure won’t be as disasterous as the Chicken Little claim … what I’m getting at is that some markets have “heard it before” so you need to be aware of that when crafting your own offer.
Now you know the background to creating an offer, tomorrow we’ll look at the first of the essential elements.
Copy Tip 5: Line Breaks
It’s Sunday. We’re at Copy Tip 5. It’s a couple of hours later than usual. It’s the relaxing day of the week. But I’m still here delivering you copy tips!
So far the tips are about your PREPARATION. The essential steps you MUST undertake to be responsive. So while they’re not directly writing tips, they’re all about copy, effectiveness and responsiveness.
(Actually Copy Tip 1 was a massive tip: write from the right perspective. So we did start of with a big one!)
But just to help whet your appetite, today I’m going to leap ahead and give you a good tip about formatting your copy.
Formatting is something we’ll cover later (issues like contrast, attention, double-readership paths and much more).
But for now, here’s one formatting tip I’d like to share … and it’s all about line breaks.
That means it is where a multi-line headline “wraps” or jumps down to the next line. It is important both in print and on the screen.
Consider for a moment the following headline:
“We Promise You The
Ultimate Shed Or Your
Money Back…
Guaranteed!”
Now it’s a big promise. And, when I used this sentence on an actual Powerpoint screen (with the type at 48 points in size), this is how the words were split across multiple lines.
But … it would look even better (easier to read, so it gets the message across more effectively) if the line endings were controlled by me, and not by the computer program used to format the words.
So I changed it to this:
“We Promise You
The Ultimate Shed
Or Your Money Back…
Guaranteed!”
Same words, but now it reads easier … there’s even a rhythm to the words in the sentence this way (and I’ll cover that too later on in this series of copy tips).
Now, the words that should stick together are all on a single line together. “We promise you” “The Ultimate Shed” “Or Your Money Back…” “Guaranteed!”
Keep an eye out for this when creating your own headings. Same words, different formatting/display … and it can make a big difference to how readable and effective they are.
For your MAIN headline, that’s especially important when you consider that five times as many prospects read the headline as compared to the body copy of the ad … so up to 80 percent of your success is based on this part of your copy.
So it sure makes sense to ensure in your headlines that your line breaks are in the right place!
Tomorrow, we’re back to your preparation … but when you see the big picture, you’ll know why this is probably the most important thing you can do well to get maximum attention, response and success!
Copy Tip 4: Your Goal
Yes, an objective. A goal. Just what do you want to achieve?
You’ve got to be clear on your goal well before you put pen to paper for your copy.
Otherwise, you won’t know what you want prospects to do once they read, view or listen to your message!
Sounds pretty simple, but there’s two really important insights to share.
Firstly, when you know your objective in advance, it helps you figure out the type of copy you need to create.
Getting people to sign up for a $20,000 per year coaching program is going to take different copy than booking in for dinner Saturday night at your local restaurant.
As well as a different message, the presentation and vehicle you use to get that message across will also be very different.
Your coaching program may need the vehicle of a seminar or face-to-face presentation to persuade your prospects to become clients, whereas you might use email online or offline postcards to fill the restaurant seats.
Secondly — something that’s often overlooked — make sure your message is focussed on achieving only the objective you set in advance.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s say you’re using lead-generation marketing to attract qualified prospects to your service.
Your first step might be — wisely — low cost advertising to attract interest in what you do. Your plan then is to have prospects request a free, valuable report, which you use to build credibility, and position yourself as the expert solution.
So your objective with the low cost advertising is NOT to sell your services … it’s simply to “sell” prospects on asking for the free report.
That means your initial message — even your testimonials and credibility copy — is focussed on convincing people it’s valuable to them to ask for the free report. Your testimonials would be more focussed on that objective than saying how good your service is or the results achieved (that’s for later, in the free report).
So when you create your initial message, all you focus on is getting across the value of the free report. Get it?
Once they’ve done that, you have the contact information and you can market more persuasively in your free report on the next objective you may have (eg consultation, audit, evaluation, meeting, booking etc).
So there’s two great things about knowing your objective (the first “O” in my MOOVE marketing formula)… it’ll set you up to create a responsive, successful message.
Copy Tip 3: A Viable Market
Okay, I jumped a little ahead of myself yesterday in getting to know your market.
(I can’t help myself, I’m excited about sharing these copy tips! I love this stuff!)
Before you get to know your market, you’ve got to make sure it is viable!
First of all, your job is to find a “starving crowd” — famously illustrated by the late, great Gary Halbert — if you’re missing issues of the Gary Halbert Letter, then you’re really not serious about this stuff!
He says it better than me of course, and that’s my source … so I’m sharing my source with you. Here’s what Gary Halbert said:
Think about it. When it comes to direct marketing, the most profitable habit you can cultivate is the habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at least hungry) for some particular product or service.
I would add this extra trait to look for and make real sure exists: do they have the capacity to buy your product or service?
If you pick a starving crowd without money to buy/invest/spend, then your chances of making profit just got splattered like an unfortunate frog crossing a busy road.
You could argue that the right message and persuasive communication can help create the capacity to buy — but still you might have a market with little money to spend.
I know a friend who once had an internet cafe serving international students and backpackers. Lots of competition, often really hard at it competing on price (there’s stacks of things I would advise, but that wasn’t my place and I sure knew less way back then than I do now). Imagine having 20 computers online som someone could come in and pay as little as 50 cents to check their emails and spend time online (this was really before the Web 2.0 stuff was around to attract much more attention and computer time!).
You open and setup the shop. Add in all the equipment. Keep in maintained. Add in utilities like electricity costs. Your online connection costs. Staff in the shop. And you’re collecting just 50 cents.
There are markets with a better capacity to buy than this!
To find your crowds, do your research. And read that Halbert article. That covers a whole heap of ways to find crowds with the right habits — who are actually doing the buying, not just saying they’ll buy.
And of course, now with all the power of online research, search engines, forums, groups, setting up tests … finding your starving crowd is a whole lot easier year by year than it was a decade ago.
Once you have your market — and you get to know them — you can get to know your objectives, create offers, find the right vehicle to reach them, evaluate what you do … and I’ll be sharing how copy is all a part of that process over the coming Copy Tips.